


Arachnid

by TheTartWitch



Series: Rewrites [2]
Category: The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agender Peter Parker, Gen, Tony Stark isn't a dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 08:59:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6148363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter meets the Avengers.<br/>Oh yeah, and Peter doesn't have a gender.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arachnid

Times have changed. Things that would be now aren’t, and things that were going to be later are happening now, on sidewalks and down alleys and under the awnings of certain bakeries on Fourth Street. And Peter, bless their soul, isn’t quite equipped to handle them.

          They’ve always hated the name the public gave them. _Spider-‘man’._ Sometimes they’ll forget for a while, swinging through the streets airborne and free, masked and anonymous, and then they’ll take down a criminal robbing a car and get a Spider _man_ to the face or retreating backside. Then the clenching in their gut starts and they feel like vomiting.

          They wanted to be known as Arachnid. It was a good superhero name that didn’t specify gender, and they were pretty sure even little kids could say it. Aunt May, bless her heart, had smiled when they sat her down and explained that she’d kind of guessed something a little different, but either way she’d always loved them and she always would.

          They resolve to always feel that hateful stomachache every time they went out as their vigilante persona and remain relatively unknown during the school day. It’s easiest. They’re already targeted simply for being a superhero; who’s to say people would understand the more… _hidden_ side?

          Everything changes when the aliens try to invade. Peter feels it, the moment the scaly hides zip into the space above ( _is it above, if it’s technically through an interdimensional wormhole?)_ New York. Their spine tingles, and their feet propel them up to flee the danger before they collapse at the intense shocks going through their body. It’s all _danger danger danger_ and Peter convulses, their instincts warring within them. At the moment when the teacher is attempting to remember what to do for seizures ( _or what probably looks like a seizure_ ) one of the students screams and points out the window at a giant serpentine metal monster slithering weightlessly out of a hole in the sky.

          In the panic, Peter stumbles out of the classroom and hides in a closet, heart beating like a cornered rabbit’s and eyes flickering from infrared to brown and back. Their body performs system checks to make sure nothing was damaged, twitching limbs and triggering phantom sensations across their nerves. It looks a lot like aftershocks from their ‘seizure’ earlier, but Peter’s brain has dosed them up to keep them still, so they can’t fight when a teacher hears the noise while evacuating and has to carry their shuddering body out to the ambulances waiting out front in case of emergency.

          Aunt May comes when the hospital staff calls her, several hours later, because the aftershocks have yet to stop and the doctors need to know about their medical history.

          Peter’s eyes are glazed. Their body has them so high off the ground they’re not registering a thing. But when the Avengers hear of a ‘boy’ who went into a seizure when the aliens landed and hasn’t come out yet, they get curious and come for a visit.

          “Bit stringy, isn’t he?” Stark mutters, and Peter mumbles under their breath, their body recognizing the presence of _something dangerous_ , _some threat_ , and waking them from the self-medication.

          Aunt May’s glower doesn’t need to be seen to be felt. “ _They_ are simply young and need time to develop.”

          Stark doesn’t say anything else while she’s around. When she leaves to use the restroom, Peter’s eyes snap open.

          Bright white and glowing, the heat signatures they sense are flooding into their brain. They know the Avengers gasp and draw weapons but they don’t care. They start to stand.

          “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” They murmur, hands raising into the air in surrender. Their eyes don’t stop glowing. “You just startled me; I’ll try to turn it off, okay?”

          The superheroes don’t ease off. Peter smiles candidly and when something crinkles, they realize the only clothes they’re wearing are the plastic hospital gown every patient receives. With a single blink, the infrared vision flickers off. The heart monitor at the side of Peter’s bed blips in succession so quickly it’s not possible that Peter the Normal Human could survive, but they’re really just standing there, spider-senses triggering the danger instincts that propel their heart into such quick movements.

          “Well, that was intense,” Stark grumbles, too low for a human to hear unless they’ve been ‘improved’, and Peter laughs.

          “So, Peter,” Tony says casually a few days later as he drags the teen to a coffee table near their high school. “I understand you’re living with your aunt at the moment, and you’re going to graduate soon and hopefully go to college?”

          Peter grinned. “College is definitely in the plans, sir.” They nodded to the barista who handed them their hot chocolate and snagged a straw off the countertop holders. “I was actually going to apply for an internship at Stark Industries, before this whole thing happened.”

          Tony nodded thoughtfully. “You mean the whole ‘mutant-instincts-triggering-a-seizure-upon-the-arrival-of-aliens’ thing? ‘Cuz yeah, I can see how that would affect someone’s life plans.” Tony sucked on his smoothie for a moment, letting Peter finish an answer on a page of homework. They hadn’t told the Avengers the truth about Spiderman yet, just that it hadn’t ever happened to that scale before.

Then Tony opened his mouth again, and Peter could tell from his expression something was about to enter it. A fly? A plane? “So what’s a nice boy like you doing without a girlfriend or boyfriend? Nobody catch your eye?”

          Nope. His foot. Open mouth, insert foot; standard procedure.

          “Nope,” they said easily, “people don’t interest me that way.” Their smile was sweet and littered with sharp canines. “And I’d prefer ‘person’ if you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Stark.”

          Tony looked confused for a moment before catching on. “Oh, I see. I apologize if I offended you.” Peter smiled.

          “You were actually very polite after I informed you, and you didn’t know beforehand, so there’s nothing to be forgiven for. I understand how that’s not exactly the first thing people jump to in terms of orientation or gender, so I don’t get angry when it happens; just a little tense.”

          Tony nodded again.  

          Peter was out on patrol again (in a duty meeting, actually) when they ran into a slight problem: someone had discovered the spiders holed up in Oscorp and had tried to steal them. The spiders had fortunately prevailed, killing the would-be thief with a single bite and then finding the door to their web room wide open. They luckily had no interest in going on a killing spree and really just wanted to room with Peter. While they were being Spiderman. Meeting with the Avengers to discuss who would handle certain villain threats.

          They just flowed right through the open windows of the Tower, cutting their web strands and plopping onto Peter’s shoulders and mask. Not wanting to be seen as a wuss even though they clearly recognized the deadly venomous spiders, they settled for raising a hand as a perch for more of the now-sleeping creatures and quietly murmuring, “Don’t touch them. They’re venomous to the degree of instant painful death,” so the Avengers would keep their hands to themselves.

          “Spiderman?” The Widow says cautiously, hand flowing to her weapon. They wince a little but answer.

          “They’re fine as long as you don’t touch them. They recognized my scent or heat signature or something; they’re shook up a bit, so it’s a little difficult to understand them, but soon they’ll calm down.” They say, smiling calmly beneath their mask.

          Tony’s eyes narrow. “’Recognize you’? How?”

          Peter’s smile gets a little forced. “Let’s just say they and I share a cousin gene or two.” They don’t stick around after that; Tony’s sure to get more out of that one statement than Peter ever meant to give.

          Peter’s unsure why Aunt May is acting so odd. Leaving little sheets of paper all over the house with news articles and pictures of their alter ego touted in bold letters on the front, cooking more, and taking up a self-defense class for senior citizens in the community centre, like the aliens are preparing to touch down again and she’s the only one who knows. They consider asking her, but decide that she’s been dropping hints for a reason so they’ll just have to figure it out themselves.

          It doesn’t help the situation that they’re trying to hide a secret of their own: the spiders from Oscorp (that have yet to be announced missing, despite the obvious danger of people stumbling upon the spiders or the Oscorp vehicles dominating traffic in the streets these days) have decided that Peter’s room (and consequently, their nest) is the perfect place for their own nest, or more precisely, the perfect centre to their ring of nests.

          They perch in their windowsill, trapping flies and beetles attempting to get in and out; they crowd the inside of Peter’s closet, snagging the smaller and less venomous of Peter’s ‘guests’; they hide in piles of their clothes until it’s laundry day and they have to move so Peter doesn’t wash them.

Somehow they understand that bothering Aunt May or leaving the house would be a bad idea, so while they go downstairs or into the bathrooms, they avoid crawling into the toilets or the sinks or skittering on the floor; they take to the ceiling and drop onto Peter’s shoulders or head when they need something. Aunt May has been suitably warned to avoid squashing or angering the blue spiders with red hourglass marks, because Peter’s not sure how they’ll react, no matter how benevolent they act now.

There’s an understanding between the spiders that Peter is the one to go to when they’re in need of assistance, even though the only other time they’d met is when Peter was breaking into Oscorp’s labs. Aunt May’s gotten used to the little creatures dropping onto their shoulder during conversations; has gotten used to watching her sister’s child tilt their head a little in the direction of the spider and then amble off, only to return moments later sans spider.

She wonders if she’d feel any different about them if they hadn’t been Spiderman. If they had just been her sister’s child.

She doesn’t think she would. They’d still be Peter, the little kid she dressed in orange frog pajamas.

And if she can accept the clingy, incredibly venomous spiders everywhere, she can accept different pronouns.

          Every once in a while, they wear a little something to celebrate certain holidays; pins, badges, and wristbands, tucked up and around their costume as decorations. Aunt May found the stash a few years ago and started doing it too without even mentioning it to Peter.

          So they don’t think anything of it when their alarm goes off early in the morning. They just stand, letting their bones crack back into place and their joints creak from the long sleep they’ve gotten with the spiders acting as their new alarm system, and slot the pin into place over their heart. When they walk into the kitchen and realize it’s a Saturday ( _no school, no awkward questions_ ) and that Aunt May’s wearing her own pin, they feel a surge of warmth.

          That surge fizzles out when they see the news report: giant mutant cats attacking people, upending cars, and pushing anything on top of hills off of them. In short, general mayhem.

          They suit up and head out, wondering how the Avengers hadn’t noticed this already but not truly stressing about it. It was just cats, right? If it truly came to the worst, they could always just call up the spiders to handle the kitties, but that made them feel bad just thinking about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know if you have any questions. Probably gonna be a one-shot.


End file.
